Hello There, Wall: Non-profit organization Wasted Spaces takes vacant properties and spaces and turns them into “art experiences.” Most recently, they took over a building in London to create an interactive installation where the public can use Twitter to control the wall. A person tweets at @thehellowall a shape, color and command, and the wall obeys.
Luxurious Potties: Thought peeing in public only happened at college campuses and the Jersey Shore? Well, you’d be mistaken. Public urination has been a problem in New Delhi, so officials have installedluxury toilets in hopes of tackling it.
Google Phone Booths: Recently becoming open to all users, Google Voice has taken a more physical form – a phone booth. Google wants to show people how GV’s voice quality compares to other services and will be rolling out a British red phone booth (complete with rotary phone) to several universities and airports in the new few weeks. Oh, and calls within the U.S. and Canada are free. Take a sneak peek inside the boothhere.
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The latest 1.1 version of Google Earth for Android now allows consumers to experience the mystifying terrain of the world’s oceans, creating a “Street View of the seas.” With its Ocean Showcase feature, it allows people to find cool new surf spots, underwater shipwrecks, marine research and diving to the ocean’s deepest trenches. This edition also includes an “Explore the Ocean” feature that allows people the ability to view hundreds of images and videos from Google’s content partners.
Check out the underwater Google Earth view of the Monterey Canyon above, which is larger than the Grand Canyon. You can navigate around with the “Look Around” button to explore the multiple angles and views of this underwater phenomenon.
Vuvuzela It: Since the start of the games there has been a lot of buzz around the vuvuzela – it seems that almost everybody in the United States hates it. But (BUT!) everybody seems obsessed with talking about it. Sensing that, YouTube has added a vuvuzela button that will play the horn noise over the video you’re watching.
Smile Machine: Unilever (an M Booth client) premiered its smile-activated ice cream vending machine at this week’s Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The high-tech machine uses facial recognition technology to identify a smile and when it does it rewards you with free ice cream. The machines are going to be introduced around the globe over the next year and a half.
Reverse Geocache Puzzle: We’re obsessed with the idea of the reverse geocache puzzle – essentially, it is a GPS-enabled box that can only be opened in one very specific location in the world. We’ve seen them before, but Make Magazine brings us the most compact iteration that we’ve seen yet.
Google Places: Remember when Google Street View was impressive? “Oh my gosh, you can see the outside of my apartment building!” you might say. That will seem like nothing with the launch of Google Places – the initiative sends a photographer around to snap pics of the inside of businesses with the hope that consumers will use the data to inform their purchasing decisions.
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I would like to publicly thank Google for transporting me back to a time when life was simple. I ate oatmeal for breakfast, went to school, played volleyball (and some days soccer) and then parked my rear on the couch in front my Nintendo console, blew into my Pacman game cartridge and tried to escape the doom of those little octopus creatures (ghosts? amoebas? who knows what they really are).
Today, mis amigos, you can play Pacman in the Google logo!
If you Googled anything today, you might have noticed there’s a familiar blue monster with a sweet tooth chomping on the search bar! In honor of Sesame Street’s upcoming 40th anniversary, Google has dedicated its “Google Doodles” to characters from the show — rumor has it, there will be a different character adorning the Google logo each day until the actual anniversary on Tuesday. Yesterday it was Big Bird, and today it’s Cookie Monster. I hope Bert and Ernie are next — they were always my personal favorites!
“The costumes took 3 weeks to build, with each weighing 85lbs and requiring a car battery to be worn between the wearer’s legs. An iPhone 3GS is attached to a 42″ LCD screen (not touch screen, alas), turning the wearer into a human-sized iPhone.”
I must be a sucker for good branding, because I love Google and Virgin (despite my terrible fear of flying).
Knowing that Google has offered to foot the WiFi bill for everybody on board Virgin America flights between November 10 and January 15 makes me love the li’l old monopoly even more.
What does Google get out of this partnership, you ask? As one commenter put it:
“It’s safe to assume that passengers will land on a Google-sponsored landing page (or the Google homepage itself) when they begin their “free” inflight Web experience. This is a great way to feature the Google brand, create buzz around a small marketing spend (compared to TV, etc.), and increase the chance that passengers will perform their searches via Google.”
Whatever Google’s rationale, I’m sure these flights will book up fast!
It’s like, well…um…it kinda sorts your…um, it’s just REALLY COOL and I need it NOW.
That’s pretty much the conversation I’ve been having regarding Google Wave. I don’t really know what exactly it does, but it’s from Google, so it must be great, right? Well, a new website has been launched, pitting Google Wave against other difficult-to-understand topics.
As fun as this may be (voting is fun!), the interesting tidbit is that it seems this website was created by a Facebook employee, clearly with a negative view of Google Wave. Is it jealousy? Is this beginning of another internet turf war? Will we be seeing some sort of integration of this new service into Facebook (à la the Twitter-standard @replies in the statuses)? Oh Mark Z, quel scandalous.
In today’s New York Times Op-Ed section, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,defends his company’s initiative to digitize all books. As in: every single book ever published.
Google Books, as the company arm is called, has been met with profound outcry from publishers and authors alike, who claim that digitizing the world’s books robs rights-holders. In the five years since Google Books began its incredible project, they have had to go through several legal battles in order to continue their work.
This initial negative reaction to the digitization of books is quick and easy. But as Brin points out, his project is not an act of reformation or revolution (I’m looking at you, Kindle). Instead, it is an act of preservation, safeguarding a culture and knowledge base that is profoundly vulnerable when housed only on paper. And by digitizing (which is, in my mind, a synonym for democratizing) knowlege, we allow it to be accessed and experienced in ways that are impossible when culture is contained in orphan, out-of-print books in far-flung libraries. What’s worthier of our protection and attention than the full sum of our culture?
You may have heard of this new thing called Google Wave — it was a trendingtopic on Twitter last week, and people all over the Internet have been begging for invites to access the private beta version — but you might not know exactly what it’s all about. At this point, nobody really does. But this easy-to-follow video has a super simple explanation that can help you begin to wrap your head around it.
Gmailwent down for a while today, and the entire Internet freaked out. Every other tweet on Twitter was about the outage, and iGoogle quickly became a trending topic, since many people found they could still access their Gmail through their iGoogle page. It seems like service has been restored for most people now, but you never know when we can expect the next annoying Internet outage that throws everyone into a frenzy!
Google Reader has been becoming much more social lately, and the newest feature is the ability to automatically export items to other sites. If you go into your Google Reader Settings and click on the “Send To” tab, you can enable exporting to Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, or a handful of other sites. Now it’s even easier to share the news you’re interested in! By the way, if you’re so inclined, you can view my shared Google Reader items here.
Did you notice? You can now “like” things on Google Reader, just like on Tumblr and Facebook. Whichever site implements a “dislike” button first will be the one that wins my heart.
TechCrunch reports that Google Books is getting an upgrade! In this newest iteration, Google Books is now more readable, readily searchable, navigable, and sharable. College thesis writers, rejoice! Your life just got significantly easier.
